Chuck Berry

Chuck Berry is the greatest of the rock and rollers. Elvis competes
with Frank Sinatra, Little Richard camps his way to self-negation,
Fats Domino looks old, and Jerry Lee Lewis looks down his noble honker
at all those who refuse to understand that Jerry Lee has chosen to
become a great country singer. But for a fee--which went up markedly
after the freak success of "My Ding-a-Ling," his first certified
million-seller, in 1972, and has now diminished again--Chuck Berry
will hop on a plane with his guitar and go play some rock and roll. He
is the symbol of the music--the first man elected to a Rock Music Hall
of Fame that exists thus far only in the projections of television
profiteers; the man invited to come steal the show at the 1975
Grammys, although he has never been nominated for one himself, not
even in the rock and roll or rhythm and blues categories. More
important, he is also the music's substance--he taught George Harrison
and Keith Richard to play guitar long before he met either, and his
songs are still claimed as encores by everyone from folkies to
heavy-metal kids. But Chuck Berry isn't merely the greatest of the
rock and rollers, or rather, there's nothing mere about it. Say rather
that unless we can somehow recycle the concept of the great artist so
that it supports Chuck Berry as well as it does Marcel Proust, we
might as well trash it altogether.

As with Charlie Chaplin or Walt Kelly or the Beatles, Chuck Berry's
greatness doesn't depend entirely on the greatness or originality of
his oeuvre. The body of his top-quality work isn't exactly vast,
comprising three or perhaps four dozen songs that synthesize two
related traditions: blues, and country and western. Although in some
respects Berry's rock and roll is simpler and more vulgar than either
of its musical sources, its simplicity and vulgarity are defensible in
the snootiest high-art terms--how about "instinctive minimalism" or
"demotic voice"? But his case doesn't rest on such defenses. It would
be as perverse to argue that his songs are in themselves as rich as,
say, Remembrance of Things Past. Their richness is rather a
function of their active relationship with an audience--a complex
relationship that shifts every time a song enters a new context, club
or album or radio or mass singalong. Where Proust wrote about a dying
subculture from a cork-lined room, Berry helped give life to a
subculture, and both he and it change every time they confront each
other. Even "My Ding-a-Ling," a fourth-grade wee-wee joke that used to
mortify true believers at college concerts, permitted a lot of
12-year-olds new insight into the moribund concept of "dirty" when it
hit the airwaves; the song changed again when an oldies crowd became
as children to shout along with Uncle Chuck the night he received his
gold record at Madison Square Garden. And what happened to "Brown Eyed
Handsome Man," never a hit among whites, when Berry sang it at
interracial rock and roll concerts in Northern cities in the Fifties?
How many black kids took "eyed" as code for "skinned"? How many
whites? How did that make them feel about each other, and about the
song? And did any of that change the song itself?

Berry's own intentions, of course, remain a mystery. Typically, this
public artist is an obsessively private person who has been known to
drive reporters from his own amusement park, and the sketches of his
life overlap and contradict each other. The way I tell it, Berry was
born into a lower middle-class colored family in St. Louis in 1926. He
was so quick and ambitious that he both served time in reform school
on a robbery conviction and acquired a degree in hairdressing and
cosmetology before taking a job on an auto assembly line to support a
wife and kids. Yet his speed and ambition persisted. By 1953 he was
working as a beautician and leading a three-piece blues group on a
regular weekend gig. His gimmick was to cut the blues with
country-influenced humorous narrative songs. These were rare in the
black music of the time, although they had been common enough before
phonograph records crystallized the blues form, and although Louis
Jordan, a hero of Berry's, had been doing something vaguely similar in
front of white audiences for years.

In 1955, Berry recorded two of his songs on a borrowed machine--"Wee
Wee Hours," a blues that he and his pianist, Johnnie Johnson, hoped to
sell, and an adapted country tune called "Ida Red." He traveled to
Chicago and met Muddy Waters, the uncle of the blues, who sent him on
to Leonard Chess of Chess Records. Chess liked "Wee Wee Hours" but
flipped for "Ida Red," which was renamed "Maybellene," a hairdresser's
dream, and forwarded to Allan Freed. Having mysteriously acquired
one-third of the writer's credit with another DJ, Freed played
"Maybellene" quite a lot, and it became one of the first nationwide
rock 'n' roll hits.

At that time, any fair-minded person would have judged this process
exploitative and pecuniary. A blues musician comes to a blues label to
promote a blues song--"It was `Wee Wee Hours' we was proud of, that
was our music," says Johnnie Johnson--but the owner of the
label decides he wants to push a novelty: "The big beat, cars, and
young love. It was a trend and we jumped on it," Chess has said. The
owner then trades away a third of the blues singer's creative sweat to
the symbol of payola, who hypes the novelty song into commercial
success and leaves the artist in a quandry. Does he stick with his
art, thus forgoing the first real recognition he's ever had, or does
he pander to popular taste?

The question is loaded, of course. "Ida Red" was Chuck Berry's music
as much as "Wee Wee Hours," which in retrospect seems rather
uninspired. In fact, maybe the integrity problem went the other
way. Maybe Johnson was afraid that the innovations of "Ida
Red"--country guitar lines adapted to blues-style picking, with the
ceaseless legato of his own piano adding rhythmic excitement to the
steady backbeat--were too far out to sell. What happened instead was
that Berry's limited but brilliant vocabulary of guitar riffs quickly
came to epitomize rock 'n' roll. Ultimately, every great white guitar
group of the early Sixties imitated Berry's style, and Johnson's piano
technique was almost as influential. In other words, it turned out
that Berry and Johnson weren't basically bluesmen at all. Through some
magic combination of inspiration and cultural destiny, they had hit
upon something more contemporary than blues, and a young audience, for
whom the Depression was one more thing that bugged their parents,
understood this better than the musicians themselves. Leonard Chess
simply functioned as a music businessman should, though only rarely
does one combine the courage and insight (and opportunity) to pull it
off, even once. Chess became a surrogate audience, picking up on new
music and making sure that it received enough exposure for everyone
else to pick up on it, too.

Obviously, Chuck Berry wasn't racked with doubt about artistic
compromise. A good blues single usually sold around 10,000 copies and
a big rhythm and blues hit might go into the hundreds of thousands,
but "Maybellene" probably moved a million, even if Chess never
sponsored the audit to prove it. Berry had achieved a grip on the
white audience and the solid future it could promise, and, remarkably,
he had in no way diluted his genius to do it. On the contrary, that
was his genius. He would never have fulfilled himself if he hadn't
explored his relationship to the white world--a relationship which was
much different for him, an urban black man who was used to machines
and had never known brutal poverty, than it was for, say, Muddy
Waters.

Berry was the first blues-based performer to successfully reclaim
guitar tricks that country and western innovators had appropriated
from black people and adapted to their own uses 25 or 50 years
before. By adding blues tone to some fast country runs, and yoking
them to a rhythm and blues beat and some unembarrassed
electrification, he created an instrumental style with biracial
appeal. Alternating guitar chords augmented the beat while Berry sang
in an insouciant tenor that, while recognizably Afro-American in
accent, stayed clear of the melisma and blurred overtones of blues
singing, both of which enter only at carefully premeditated
moments. His few detractors still complain about the repetitiveness of
this style, but they miss the point. Repetition without tedium is the
backbone of rock and roll, and the components of Berry's music proved
so durable that they still provoke instant excitement at concerts
durable that they still provoke instant excitement at concerts two
decades later. And in any case, the instrumental repetition was
counterbalanced by unprecedented and virtually unduplicated verbal
variety.

Chuck Berry is the greatest rock lyricist this side of Bob Dylan, and
sometimes I prefer him to Dylan. Both communicate an abundance of the
childlike delight in linguistic discovery that page poets are supposed
to convey and too often don't, but Berry's most ambitious lyrics,
unlike Dylan's, never seem pretentious or forced. True, his language
is ersatz and barbaric, full of mispronounced foreignisms and
advertising coinages, but then, so was Whitman's. Like Whitman, Berry
is excessive because he is totally immersed in America--the America of
Melville and the Edsel, burlesque and installment-plan funerals,
pemmican and pomade. Unlike Whitman, though, he doesn't quite permit
you to take him seriously--he can't really think it's pronounced "a la
carty," can he? He is a little surreal. How else can a black man as
sensitive as Chuck Berry respond to the affluence of white America--an
affluence suddenly his for the taking.

Chuck Berry is not only a little surreal but also a little schizy;
even after he committed himself to rock 'n' roll story songs,
relegating the bluesman in him to B sides and album fillers, he found
his persona split in two. In three of the four singles that followed
"Maybellene," he amplified the black half of his artistic personality,
the brown-eyed handsome man who always came up short in his quest for
the small-time hedonism American promises everyone. By implication,
Brown Eyes' sharp sense of life's nettlesome and even oppressive
details provided a kind of salvation by humor, especially in "Too Much
Monkey Business," a catalog of hassles that included work, school and
the army. But the white teenagers who were the only audience with the
cultural experience to respond to Berry's art weren't buying this kind
of salvation, not en masse. They wanted something more optimistic and
more specific to themselves; of the four singles that followed
"Maybellene," only "Roll Over Beethoven," which introduced Berry's
other half, the rock 'n' roller, achieved any real success. Chuck got
the message. His next release, "School Day," was another complaint
song, but this time the complaints were explicitly adolescent and were
relieved by the direct action of the rock 'n' roller. In fact, the
song has been construed as a prophecy of the Free Speech Movement:
"Close your books, get out of your seat/Down the halls and into the
street."

It has become a cliché to attribute the rise of rock and roll to a new
parallelism between white teenagers and black Americans; a common
"alienation" and even "suffering" are often cited. As with most
clichés, this one has its basis in fact--teenagers in the Fifties
certainly showed an unprecedented consciousness of themselves as a
circumscribed group, though how much that had to do with marketing
refinements and how much with the Bomb remains unresolved. In any
case, Chuck Berry's history points up the limits of this notion. For
Berry was closer to white teenagers both economically (that reform
school stint suggests a JD exploit, albeit combined with a racist
judicial system) and in spirit (he shares his penchant for
youthfulness with Satchel Paige but not Henry Aaron, with Leslie
Fiedler but not Norman Podhoretz) than the average black man. And even
at that, he had to make a conscious (not to say calculated) leap of
the imagination to reach them, and sometimes fell short.

Although he scored lots of minor hits, Chuck Berry made only three
additional Billboard Top Ten singles in the Fifties--"Rock and
Roll Music," "Sweet Little Sixteen," and "Johnny B. Goode"--and every
one of them ignored Brown Eyes for the assertive, optimistic, and
somewhat simpleminded rock 'n' roller. In a pattern common among
popular artists, his truest and most personal work didn't flop, but it
wasn't overwhelmingly popular either. For such artists, the audience
can be like a drug. A little of it is so good for them that they
assume a lot of it would be even better, but instead the big dose saps
their autonomy, often so subtly that they don't notice it. For Chuck
Berry, the craving for overwhelming popularity proved slightly
dangerous. At the same time that he was enlivening his best songs with
faintly Latin rhythms, which he was convinced were the coming thing,
he was also writing silly exercises with titles like "Hey Pedro."
Nevertheless, his pursuit of the market also worked a communion with
his audience, with whom he continued to have an instinctive rapport
remarkable in a 30-year-old black man. For there is also a sense in
which the popular artist is a drug for the audience, and a doctor,
too--he has to know how much of his vital essence he can administer at
one time, and in what compound.

The reason Berry's rock 'n' roller was capable of such insightful
excursions into the teen psyche--"Sweet Little Sixteen," a celebration
of everything lovely about fanhood; or "Almost Grown," a basically
unalianated first-person expression of teen rebellion that Sixties
youth-cult pundits should have taken seriously--was that he shared a
crucial American value with the humorous Brown Eyes. That value was
fun. Even among rock critics, who ought to know better, fun doesn't
have much of a rep, so that they commiserate with someone like LaVern
Baker, a second-rate blues and gospel singer who felt she was selling
her soul every time she launched into a first-rate whoop of nonsense
like "Jim Dandy" or "Bumble Bee." But fun was what adolescent revolt
had to be about--inebriated affluence versus the hangover of the work
ethic. It was the only practicable value in the Peter Pan utopia of
the American dream. Because black music had always thrived on
exuberance--not just the otherworldly transport of gospel, but the
candidly physical good times of great pop blues singers like Washboard
Sam, who is most often dismissed as a lightweight by the heavy blues
critics--it turned into the perfect vehicle for generational
convulsion. Black musicians, however, had rarely achieved an optimism
that was cultural as well as personal--those few who did, like Louis
Armstrong, left themselves open to charges of Tomming. Chuck Berry
never Tommed. The trouble he'd seen just made his sly, bad-boy voice
and the splits and waddles of his stage show that much more credible.

Then, late in 1959, fun turned into trouble. Berry had imported a
Spanish-speaking Apache prostitute he'd picked up in El Paso to check
hats in his St. Louis nightclub, and then fired her. She went to the
police, and Berry was indicted under the Mann Act. After two trials,
the first so blatantly racist that it was disallowed, he went to
prison for two years. When he got out, in 1964, he and his wife had
separated, apparently a major tragedy for him. The Beatles and the
Rolling Stones had paid him such explicit and appropriate tribute that
his career was probably in better shape after his jail term than
before, but he couldn't capitalize. He had a few hits--"Nadine" and
"No Particular Place to Go" (John Lennon is one of the many who
believe they were written before he went in)--but the well was
dry. Between 1965 and 1970 he didn't release one-even passable new
song, and he died as a recording artist.

In late 1966, Berry left Chess for a big advance from Mercury
Records. The legends of his money woes at Chess are numerous, but
apparently the Chess brothers knew how to record him--the stuff he
produced himself for Mercury was terrible. Working alone with pickup
bands, he still performed a great deal, mostly to make money for Berry
Park, a recreation haven 30 miles from St. Louis. And as he toured, he
found that something had happened to his old audience--it was getting
older, with troubles of its own, and it dug blues. At auditoriums like
the Fillmore, where he did a disappointing live LP with the Steve
Miller Blues Band, Chuck was more than willing to stretch out on a
blues. One of his favorites was from Elmore James: "When things go
wrong, wrong with you, it hurts me too."

By 1970, he was back home at Chess, and suddenly his new audience
called forth a miracle. Berry was a natural head--no drugs, no
alcohol--and most of his attempts to cash in on hippie talk had been
embarrassments. But "Tulane," one of his greatest story songs, was the
perfect fantasy. It was about two dope dealers: "Tulane and Johnny
opened a novelty shop/ Back under the counter was the cream of the
crop." Johnny is nabbed by narcs, but Tulane, his girlfriend, escapes,
and Johnny confidently predicts that she will buy off the
judge. Apparently she does, for there is a sequel, a blues. In "Have
Mercy Judge," Johnny has been caught again, and this time he expects
to be sent to "some stony mansion." Berry devotes the last stanza to
Tulane, who is "too alive to live alone." The last line makes me
wonder just how he felt about his own wife when he went to prison:
"Just tell her to live, and I'll forgive her, and even love her more
when I come back home."

Taken together, the two songs are Berry's peak, although Leonard Chess
would no doubt have vetoed the vocal double-track on "Tulane" that
blurs its impact a bit. Remarkably, "Have Mercy Judge" is the first
important blues Berry ever wrote, and like all his best work it isn't
quite traditional, utilizing an abc line structure instead of
the usual aab. Where did it come from? Is it unreasonable to
suspect that part of Berry really was a bluesman all along, and that
this time, instead of him going to his audience, his audience came to
him and provided the juice for one last masterpiece?

Berry's career would appear closed. He is a rock and roll monument at
50, a pleasing performer whose days of inspiration are over. Sometime
in the next 30 years he will probably die, and while his songs have
already stuck in the public memory a lot longer than Washboard Sam's,
it's likely that most of them will fade away too. So is he, was he,
will he be a great artist? It won't be we judging, but perhaps we can
think of it this way. Maybe the true measure of his greatness was not
whether his songs "lasted"--a term which as of now means persisted
through centuries instead of decades--but that he was one of the ones
to make us understand that the greatest thing about art is the way it
happens between people. I am grateful for aesthetic artifacts, and I
suspect that a few of Berry's songs, a few of his recordings, will
live on in that way. I only hope that they prove too alive to live
alone. If they do, and if by some mishap Berry's name itself is
forgotten, that will nevertheless be an entirely apposite kind of
triumph for him.